Maki Fine Arts is pleased to present Yasuko Toyoshima's solo show Quadrilateral, starting Sunday, October 8, 2017, in our new relocated gallery space in Nishigoken-cho, Shinjuku.
Born 1967 in Saitama, Japan, Yasuko Toyoshima received her MFA from Tokyo University of the Arts in 1993.
Recent shows include The Capital Room: Beyond Three Dimensional Logical Pictures vol.1 Yasuko TOYOSHIMA (2015, gallery αM), MOT Collection: Collection Ongoing (2016, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo), and Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions: Multiple Future (2017, Tokyo Photographic Art Museum).
By looking at institutions and systems found in everyday life and in our society with a critical eye, Toyoshima has been focused on discovering shapes of the human thought. In her first exhibition with Maki Fine Arts, the artist will showcase a dozen works from her latest "Quadrilateral" series.

Turning into a Shape's Alter Ego
Ryo Katsumata (art critic)

The rectangular areas remaining on the plywood after it is carved can also be considered shapes of the plywood itself. The internal iteration of the rectangles seen in Yasuko Toyoshima's recent works is obtained by utilizing the unique multi-layer characteristic of the plywood. Color contrasts, varying between the top and lower layers, are visualized with relief-like undulations. As a result of this principle, a piece of plywood becomes segmented into multiple rectangles.
Through this process of multiplying the rectangles, a notable relationship materializes between the original rectangle of the plywood (the shape of the support medium) and the rectangles which have emerged as a result of carving the plywood (the shape developed within the support medium). This occurs because as the indisputable foundation, the shape of the support medium--normally invisible and unchallenged--becomes analogous due to the internal repetition of similarly-shaped forms. In other words, the status of the support medium's rectangle as the absolute foundation now becomes rattled.
Incidentally, the notion of how the carved-out rectangles appear to be "floating" is not limited to the physical concavity and convexity. Originally, the surface layer coincided in both the shape of the entire plywood and the shape of the support medium, but now, rectangles of the carved-out areas have shifted their axes and turned away from the plywood's orientation, as though they have had an out-of-body experience floating away from the original base. The result is only materialized when the common rectangular shapes are partitioned into alter egos. Through this division, the rectangle supporting the pictorial formal concept is forced to disengage from synthesis and go through a careful re-examination. The result is an upgrade into a separate order. What remains is none other than a place complete with moldable thickness where multiple layers intersect into a mosaic.